Archive for the ‘3D graphs’ Category

More about Troy’s $million hair here. Hair statistics including how many hairs a human has on their head here.

Mathspig studied hair chemistry at uni. Tricky stuff. Put simply, hair is made of long strands of protein called keratin held together by sulphur (and some hydrogen) bonds. To curl hair, the keratin strands in the outer curve of each hair has to be stretched with curling tongs or hair curlers, heated and dried. The bonds in each hair reform with one side longer than the other … Hence, the hair curls like gift-wrap ribbon. But high humidity allows hair to reabsorb water and straightened hair just goes psycho curly again!

Some people are born with hair follicles that produce keratin at different rates across the follicle. They have curly hair. Hair perms chemically break and reform the sulphur bonds while the hair is held in small curlers (curly hair) or a very big curlers(relatively straight hair.) thus permanently curling the hair.

CHALLENGE:

Mathspig doesn’t expect Middle School students to plot a 3D Helix. But if they have started TRIGONOMETRY then they can see that the maths they are studying is used in CGIs for films and computer games in this case to generate realistic curly hair!!!! That’s cool. This maths was needed to model Merida’s curly hair in BRAVE.

SMARTY PANTS CHALLENGE:

Some middle school students could calculate some points on the helix.

Now students must be introduced to radians.

Simple EXPLANATION: Angles eg. 300 are not useful in calculations but fractions are very useful.

Eg. The circumference of a circle:

C = 2πr

Now imagine if you scan with a floodlight set at a radius of 1 km. So:

According to Rachel Gross of Wired Magazine in 2009 Chung’s team designed a new simulator named Taz, after the wild Looney Tunes character. It forms individual coils around computer-generated cylinders of varying lengths and diameters. The resulting locks stretch out when Merida runs but snap back into place as soon as she stops. Add a little randomness, some gravity, and more than 1,500 hand-placed corkscrews and flyaway wisps and voilà: hair with depth and texture viewers have never seen before. The result may look wild, but it’s not. “It’s very stylized, very controlled,” Chung says. No hair spray required.

But, co-author Pedro Reis, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and of civil and environmental engineering at MIT noted. “ the geometry of a curly hair is highly nonlinear— a word we often use for something complicated.”

The model could also calculate curvature of steel pipes or other spooled material. “We were engineers trying to solve practical, useful problems from the start,” Reis says. “I’m not a professional hairstylist—I’m bald, actually.”

Pringles are mathematically yummy because each Pringle is a little 3D graph called a Hyperbolic Paraboloid or – YeeHa! – it’s a saddle.. You will find information about Hyperbolic Paraboloid at the fab Math Jokes 4 Mathy Folks bloghere and here.

You may have drawn 2D graphs. Bar graphs, Pie Charts and Linear Graphs.

A linear graph will have the equation

y = mx + c

You might have looked at quadratic equations such as the parabola:

Y = ax2 + bx + c

So what could a 3D graph of a saddle look like? Well, you have to add a z so that you have an x-axis, y-axis and a z-axis.